cdfrey:
I'll openly stereotype and state that I consider the
Japanese some of the nicest, kindest, hardest working, least
selfish
people on the planet. Of course, every group has its bad
apples, but I get a bit envious when I compare certain
aspects of their culture with that of my own country. Do you
know of any other place where schools, both public and
private, are cleaned
by students and teachers[1]? (Maybe that's
why they
never litter.) Stereotype it may be, but one that is
supported by their admirable behavior throughout this
catastrophe (no looting, people helping each other).

I don't want to have anything to do with a
spiteful god that punishes such people.

I'm sorry for my earlier offensive (and quite
crackpotish)
diary entry, but a comment I read somewhere really pushed my
buttons. I understand that one can be a Christian and not
think that way [2]. I
was going to delete that diary entry, but I
suppose that now it's a bit late and I'll just have to own
it up.

And yes, I donated to the Haiti relief
efforts, too.

[1] when I
commented on
this to
my Japanese friend, she was quite surprised. "What do you
mean? It
isn't like that in your country? Who does the cleaning, then?"

We should do something about the spammer
problem.
For a site meant for hackers, this is an embarrassment.

Crackpots

Each and every news article on the web covering the
events now unfolding at a certain far-east country is
littered with comments written by religious wackos, who seem
to be convinced that this is all the doing of a bearded Galactus-like
superbeing in the sky, outraged at the refusal by the
population of the aforementioned country to accept and
embrace their religion of love and compassion. (The claim
that it's a religion of love and compassion, while
apparently at odds with the implication that their imaginary
friend has just murdered tens of thousands of people on a
whim, is
to be accepted without questioning, because a horrible book
written by pig-ignorant savages before flush toilets were
invented says that it is so.) The same crackpots wrote
similar things about the recent disaster in Haiti. (You
know, voodoo.)

Up to now, I've always evaded the question whenever
someone
mentioned religion, careful not to offend anyone. But you
know what? I'll finally get out of the closet and say it:
I'm an atheist. That's right, I'm not even agnostic.
If accepting your religion in order to go to heaven
means I'll have to endure the company of you nutsos for the
rest of eternity, I'd rather burn in hell. You make me sick
to my stomach.

I searched for open source English grammar checkers,
naively
thinking that they would work by fully parsing English, but
most of them only do pattern matching to look for common
errors - like LanguageTool, used by
OpenOffice. They are peephole optimizers, not complete parsers.

Except for Link
Grammar, used by AbiWord. This one does parse
English!

Even though it doesn't answer my original question (it
thinks that "explain me something" is okay), it is quite cool.

proclus: no offense man,
but your
photograph isn't that interesting. Do you really need to
post a link to it so many times?

dangermaus:
thank you very much for sharing that article! I'll translate
your conclusions (and comparisons with the Chernobyl
catastrophe) to Japanese and post them to my Japanese
language blog. Hope you don't mind!

My English grammar book simply says that, after a
ditransitive verb (which takes a direct and an indirect
object), the indirect object can either come in a
prepositional phrase after the direct object ("She told
something <to me>") or directly after the verb ("She told
<me> something"), implying that the relevant bit of
the yacc
code for English looks like this:

Different language, but I still feel that I'm
essentially banging at the keyboard at random until I arrive
at something that compiles. Plus ça change...

I'm trying to improve my English. I'd like to understand why
"she told me something" is allowed, but "she explained me
something" makes native English speakers emit a parse error.
Does anyone out there know where I can get a BNF for English?